I. Prologue

Imagine that you are driving home in the Western desert, just as the sky begins to darken, the pale lavender and pinks of a muted sunset. As you turn onto your street, your heart leaps in your chest as you see, in front of your house, a multitude of police cars. Fire trucks. The ambulance. Sirens wailing, neighbors crowding, staring silently.

As you draw nearer, you realize with some relief that while the bell tolls, today it is not for thee; the emergency response has been called to your neighbors’ house. Police attempt to calm Mrs. White, whose elegant cream blouse is streaked with blood; her face, with tears and anguish. Her son, a teenager, leans on his crutches as he peers out the door of their home.

The neighbors gossip. Her husband left not fifteen minutes ago, in a fury, bundling their toddler daughter roughly into the back of the family station wagon and roaring down the road. She ran screaming after them before collapsing at the end of the street. One of the neighbors called the cops.

They suspect infidelity; what else could make them argue so? Maybe abuse—all the blood!—but he didn’t seem the type. Quiet, the Whites. Mostly kept to themselves. He used to teach chemistry, you think, at the local high school, but your kids have been grown for years, so you’re not sure. You’d heard he had cancer, but you didn’t know too much about it.

Soon their story trickles out in the news. Firemen recover the baby girl unharmed a few hours later based on an anonymous tip. Walter White is a person of interest in the disappearance and presumed death of his brother-in-law, a narcotics officer. But then the story falls right through the looking glass. He’s wanted for the distribution of methamphetamines. He’s killed people. Mrs. White and the kids move; you never hear from them again, but the rumor is that she knows where all his money is.

The neighbors think they’ve gone to New York. Or maybe Mexico.

Living next door, you’re dismayed as the house falls into disrepair after foreclosure. Fortunately, no methamphetamine had been cooked on the premises, but the shell of their home has become a target for vandals, a shrine for the local underworld. You chase young punks off your lawn nearly every weekend. Your spouse worries about property values.

Nearly a year later, the local news reports that White’s been found, dead of multiple gunshot wounds, in a meth lab on the outskirts of town. Members of a local skinhead gang lie dead nearby; he’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people. You shake your head, marveling at how an ordinary man could hide such a twisted double life.

II. The Moral Evaluation of Film

You probably recognized that the introduction imagined the climactic episode of Breaking Bad (2008) from the perspective of the neighbors of the protagonist, Walter White.¹ Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston, is a middle-aged, milquetoast chemistry teacher who responds to a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer by deciding to manufacture and distribute methamphetamines. The series’ creator, Vince Gilligan, explains White’s character arc as “turning Mr. Chips into Scarface”; by the end of the series, White is a ruthless murderer. The audience is meant to sympathize with White, and according to Gilligan, that they do so successfully depended heavily on the mastery of Cranston’s performance: “We had this villain [in an episode of The X-Files], and we needed the audience to feel bad for him when he died,” Gilligan said. “Bryan alone was the only actor who could do that, who could pull off that trick. And it is a trick. I have no idea how he does it.”²

Fans loved the character, and they rooted for him to such an extent that the actress Anna Gunn, who plays Walter’s (quite reasonably) unsympathetic wife, received hate mail from fans who thought that her character should be more supportive of Walt. Their reaction is significant, aside from their confusion of fiction and reality, for they believed that Walt deserved better. They’re rooting for him.

If Walter White were your neighbor, odds are that you’d be shocked. And while you might feel compassion upon learning of his cancer diagnosis, undoubtedly you would not think him justified in turning to violent crime, let alone cheer him on!

There’s a puzzle here. It’s not unique to Breaking Bad, for there are many films such as revisionist westerns like A Fistful of Dollars (1969) or television shows like The Wire (2002) and The Sopranos (1999) or comic books like The Punisher where the protagonists lack traditional heroic qualities. “Gritty” fictions without clear heroes, where everyone is painted in shades of dismal gray, have become popular, and their popularity gives rise to some interesting philosophical questions.

Do we err morally when we root for an immoral fictional character? Are fictions worse aesthetically if they invite us to endorse morally questionable attitudes?

Let’s begin our inquiry by thinking about how we engage with fictions in film. The film tells us a story, consisting of propositions that are true in the fiction. In the fiction Star Wars, it’s true that Jedi can use the force and that the Empire created the Death Star. What is true in the fiction includes those propositions that the film directly presents or asserts, plus whatever extra propositions are needed to make sense of the fiction. For example, it’s true in A Fistful of Dollars that there are no cars because, even though the film never bothers to mention it, it’s clearly set in a time period in the West before the automobile was available. What extra propositions are true in the fiction is affected by genre and by cultural context. Consumers of realistic works will assume that the fiction is very much like the real world in general terms; the rules will differ for fantasy works. Let’s call this extended fiction, including what the film sets forth for us plus the background knowledge that we bring to bear on the story, the world of the film.³

When we engage with the world of a film, we use our imaginations and, for a time, allow ourselves to imagine that the world is real. We “suspend our disbelief”; if we believe, for example, that there is no way a person could gain super-strength by absorbing solar energy, we wisely set that aside so we can enjoy watching Superman’s feats of derring-do. We don’t think about the impossible physics of flying dragons when watching Game of Thrones (2011). It simply takes all the fun out of it. Cultural conventions encourage us to set aside those concerns while we imagine world of the film.

When we engage with a fiction, such as Breaking Bad, that focuses on immorality, we are invited to imagine immoral actions in some detail. Over the course of the series, Walt murders several people, arranges the murder of several more, manufactures methamphetamines, and poisons a young boy. To engage in the fiction is to imagine, for a short while, that his story is real. We imagine truly horrific situations for mere entertainment.

Yet the first question that we might ask ourselves is whether there is a moral puzzle here at all. Consider that we describe a film as fiction to indicate that the events and people it portrays are not real. No one really dies in the camps of Schindler’s List (1993); no one suffers bondage in Twelve Years a Slave (2013). Walt doesn’t really hurt anyone because he doesn’t really exist. So we might be inclined to think that the evaluation of films lies wholly distinct from any ethical evaluation at all, concluding that we may judge films on their artistic merits, but that morality stops at the theater door. Fiction isn’t real. It has nothing to do with morality. Yet while that conclusion would be convenient (among other things, this essay would be much shorter), it is alas also too quick. We can surely think of films that we might be inclined to judge as immoral even if we applaud their artistic merits, such as the racist Birth of a Nation (1915) or the Nazi propaganda vehicle Triumph of the Will (1935).

Moreover, many fictions purport to teach us about the world. If we watch Schindler’s List, we learn about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the heroism of those who resisted. If we watch Hotel Rwanda (2004), we learn about the bravery of those who saved lives during the brutal days of the Rwandan genocide. It doesn’t seem crazy to think that engaging these fictions appropriately might make us into more thoughtful, more informed, more engaged people. We need not restrict ourselves to fictions based on true stories; we may learn a lot about bravery and prejudice by watching To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), or at least we may find it plausible that this film hopes to teach us a moral lesson.

For these reasons, it doesn’t seem plausible to hold that there can be no moral evaluation of films at all, but rather that merely looking at the content of the film won’t be sufficient to tell us how to evaluate it. Darth Vader orders the destruction of an entire peaceful planet in Star Wars (1977); but it wouldn’t seem right to vilify the film for its callous depiction of genocide. No Alderaanians were harmed in the making of this film.

What else do we need? The world of the film also authorizes attitudes toward its content. We are supposed to sympathize with Walter White as he struggles with cancer, to cheer for Harrison Ford as president in Air Force One (1997) when he throws the terrorists off his plane, to laugh at the antics of the Wedding Crashers (20). We should weep for Desdemona; someone who took Othello to be a comedy would be interacting with the play incorrectly. Worlds of film tell us not just what happens, but invite us to feel a certain way about it. Not all films are successful in their emotional aims, of course; an overly maudlin melodrama may inadvertently make us laugh at the characters instead of feel sympathy toward them. But all fictions invite their audiences to have emotional responses.⁴ It is in the attitudes which the world of the film encourages us to adopt that we might find some moral purchase. Consider that many films have a protagonist, the central character in the story, whose perspective we adopt, and for whom we are supposed to root. In many of those films, the character exhibits heroic qualities, personal virtues that make them the sort of person whose perspective we should adopt. When we watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we encounter Frodo and Sam, who are goodhearted friends who find themselves on a harrowing quest. They exhibit the virtues of courage and fortitude. Along the way, they vie against villains: murderous orcs, evil sorcerers, even weak-willed humans. While they—and indeed most heroes—need not be perfect, they are identifiably good, and our sympathies are meant to lie with them.

As a result, while the films contain violence and depictions of corruption and evil, we can argue that the films enjoin us to imagine these events as bad and to imagine our protagonists as good for exhibiting virtues that allow them to fight evil. To demonstrate anger against injustice is a virtue. To fight violently to save a life is praiseworthy. Our sympathies are with the good guys. The world of the film asks us to have correct moral attitudes toward evil by asking us to sympathize with the protagonists that fight it. When we watch Star Wars, we are to be shocked at the destruction of Alderaan, and view the Empire as evil for having destroyed it. Believing that those who destroy planets are evil is to exhibit an appropriate moral attitude.⁵

The morality of Breaking Bad is more complicated. In Breaking Bad, Walt is an anti-hero. An anti-hero is a protagonist, but it is a protagonist that lacks conventional heroic virtues. The heroic protagonist may be flawed, but the anti-hero is all flaws. Where heroes are courageous, anti-heroes skulk. Where heroes fight for justice, anti-heroes fight for selfish interest.

Walt’s initial motivation to make and sell drugs ostensibly stems from his cancer diagnosis. He knows that he has not long to live and that affording treatment will bankrupt his family. His teenaged son is disabled, and his wife is pregnant. He calculates how much money they’ll need to live without him, including the cost of college. He looks like a flawed hero: a man who will do anything to save his family.

Yet as the series progresses, Walt reveals that his family’s future was at best a secondary consideration: he turns down financial assistance from wealthy friends who owe their fortune to him; he does not stop selling drugs even after he has surpassed his financial needs; he claims that he is not in the business of getting money or even of selling drugs, but the “empire business.” And he admits, to his estranged wife, in the last episode that he did it for himself, for selfish reasons. The series succeeds in turning Mr. Chips to Scarface, and yet we want to root for him like he’s still Mr. Chips. We are asked to endorse Walt’s behavior, which we would surely find troubling were it real life!

Focusing on the attitudes that the fiction endorses helps us clarify some of the questions that were raised earlier. Intuitively, it seems that Triumph of the Will is flawed morally, and that Schindler’s List is morally praiseworthy. By considering the attitudes that each film endorses, we are now in a position to explain why. Triumph of the Will presents Hitler as the appropriate object of admiration and awe, when the appropriate reaction to have to Hitler is scorn. Schindler’s List depicts the horrors of the concentration camps but instructs us to be horrified and saddened, which are fitting reactions. So we may usefully distinguish between worlds of film that merely depict evil, and those that ask us to endorse evil, and in this we have the germ of a principle:

It’s important to note the limitations of this principle. A fiction can be morally flawed with respect to some of its attitudes but overall present morally praiseworthy attitudes. Historical fictions often invite us to endorse practices that we no longer support (e.g., torture of religious heretics, adoration of monarchs), but also to endorse values that we do hold (courage, justice, and so forth). So to say that a work is morally flawed is not to say that the work all things considered is immoral because the work may exhibit other moral values that outweigh the questionable attitudes that it invites. Understood this way, rooting for a flawed protagonist is nothing more than a special case of the general principle, and presents no particular difficulty for our theory.

III. Moral Flaws as Aesthetic Flaws

We have concluded that films can be the objects of moral evaluation. They can be morally praiseworthy, morally blameworthy, or somewhere in between. Yet we also evaluate films on aesthetic grounds, and here, considering morality raises another interesting question, for which the case of the anti-hero is particularly instructive.

To evaluate something aesthetically is to consider it as an object of aesthetic appreciation: loosely speaking, to treat it as if it were a work of art. For example, suppose you dine at a fine restaurant, and you are served an elaborately presented meal. You could evaluate the meal simply on nutritional grounds, calculating whether it meets your caloric requirements and your desired ratio of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. You could evaluate it based on its price. You could also evaluate it as if it were a work of art, treating the presentation of the food as an object of appreciation, adopting an aesthetic attitude which some philosophers think is characteristic of treating something as a work of art.

When we evaluate something aesthetically, we set aside other standards of evaluation. If we were to treat a meal as an aesthetic object, we would perhaps contemplate the technique that the chef used to achieve the precise sear on the meat, or admire the artistry with which the meal was plated and presented. When we taste it, we would care not just whether it tasted good, but how the components of the meal harmonized together. We won’t, in that moment, care about its nutritional value or environmental impact, although of course we may continue to do so in other contexts.

Films are, of course, well-suited to being evaluated aesthetically, and in many cases, the aesthetic evaluation of the work dominates other avenues of criticism. We do not usually treat Braveheart as if it were a history lesson or Star Wars as if it were a treatise on religion in an age of faster-than-light travel. In fact, if we are trying to enjoy a film, we often try to set aside other considerations, so as not to spoil the fun.

We have established so far that we can evaluate films on moral grounds, but now we should consider a subtler question. Suppose that a work is flawed morally. Does its moral flaw amount to an aesthetic flaw? In other words, is a work of art that promotes an immoral point of view thereby a worse work of art?

We can identify two broad categories of answers to this question, and following convention, we can call them the autonomists and the moralists. Autonomists hold that moral evaluation and aesthetic evaluation are always distinct. A work that promotes a good moral attitude is not aesthetically better because of it, and a work that promotes a bad moral attitude is not aesthetically worse because of it.⁶

To be clear, the autonomist doesn’t need to hold that we cannot evaluate films or other works of art on moral grounds. Rather, she needs to hold that when we do so, we generate no criticism of the film as a work of art. Moral questions and aesthetic questions are to be kept distinct.

In support of the autonomist view, we might consider that the question of whether something is beautiful, for example, is supposed to be a different question of whether something is good. Moreover, there are many works that exhibit good moral messages than are not particularly good examples of art. Consider Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood (2012), an animated television program aimed at preschool children. In the show, Daniel Tiger and his friends learn moral lessons appropriate to young children: how to share; how to manage feelings; how to help others; and similar foundations of basic polite behavior. The world of Daniel Tiger is soft, gentle, and always perfectly moral. Mom Tiger is always kind and patient; Dad Tiger, involved and loving. Daniel is surrounded by helpful friends and wise teachers. We are to be like them, and the show provides helpful musical motifs that we might sing to remind ourselves to be good. It is fabulous educational television.

Contrast this with the world of Breaking Bad. We’ve met Walt and his moral compass, but the rest of the cast is not much better as role models. His wife is unfaithful and eventually helps hide his ill-gotten gains through money-laundering. His son, rebellious. His sister-in-law? A narcissist and a petty thief. His brother-in-law? A crass loudmouth. His associates? Drug lords. Junkies. Hit men. Through beautiful cinematography and unparalleled writing and performances, we come to like them all. It is fabulous entertainment.

The autonomist would say that the strong morality of Daniel Tiger makes it a wonderful educational tool for children, but that it is not better, considered as a work of art, for having a good moral message. We evaluate it as a work of art by appealing to features like the quality of its animation, musical motifs, or voice acting. Likewise, Breaking Bad isn’t made worse aesthetically because it glorifies bad guys. The two are wholly separate. Art is for the sake of art—alone!

In support of this position, the autonomist could argue that were we to deny the autonomy of art, we could wind up with some counterintuitive conclusions. Works that promoted a sufficiently strong moral message would be automatically better art than works that didn’t. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood would be better than Breaking Bad. Moreover, we can intuitively quite easily separate the moral evaluation of a work from its aesthetic value. For example, consider the landmark film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), which featured, at the height of the civil rights movement, an interracial couple confronting the prejudices of their parents. The film was justly lauded as an important contribution to the developing conversation about prejudice and civil rights. Over time, the film arguably hasn’t aged as well as one might have hoped; some of the characters seem more like caricatures rather than fully developed people, and the message about prejudice seems to be heavy-handed. It now seems most shocking not for the interracial marriage, but for the fact that Sydney Poitier’s handsome doctor is roughly twenty years older than his young bride! Its moral message is clearly good—but that does not make the film better aesthetically.

The autonomist says that the answer to these puzzles is simple: keep moral evaluation and aesthetic evaluation separate. Moralists, by contrast, hold that moral evaluation can affect aesthetic evaluation. A work of art can be a worse work of art in virtue of the fact that it exhibits bad moral attitudes; it can be a better work of art in virtue of the fact that it exhibits good moral attitudes. To put it another way, the moral attitudes exhibited by a work of art are directly relevant to how we should evaluate that work of art.

We find ourselves with strong intuitions on behalf of the moralist, too. Consider again the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The film is remarkably beautiful. The director, Leni Riefenstahl, pioneered many new film techniques that are both powerful and still in use today. She films crowd scenes from the perspective of someone riding on the back of a motorcycle, so the crowd appears to be streaming by. In the opening scenes, she presents Germany dappled in the sunlight of a gorgeous morning as a plane descends through the clouds, as the camera cuts to banners featuring the Nazi emblem. It’s morning in Germany—and an absolutely stunning shot.

Yet, with the wisdom of history, it’s impossible to ignore that all of this beautiful cinematography supported Adolf Hitler and his murderous regime. Adoring crowds welcome him. Children present him with flowers. The film makes him seem normal, even exciting—look at the rallies! The parades! Intuitively, the film is bad ethically because it praises Hitler. Moreover, it seems plausible that it is worse as art because it is in service of fascism. It would be better as art if the film had a different moral message. But it’s hard to say how without accidentally insisting that only morally good works of art can be aesthetically valuable.

Both the autonomist and the moralist can point to strong intuitions that we have regarding the aesthetic evaluation of artwork. Our challenge is to find a way to incorporate both sets of intuitions. We don’t want it to be the case that morally good works are automatically aesthetically valuable or that morally flawed works are automatically worthless, but it seems natural to think that advocating for vile attitudes should make a work of art less aesthetically valuable.

What we need is a way to convert a moral flaw into an aesthetic flaw. One promising proposal links moral flaws with the possibility of imaginative failure. Recall that to engage with a film requires using one’s imagination, suspending disbelief, and adopting appropriate attitudes. A work that incorporates features that really grab the audience, is, all else being equal, going to be a more successful work aesthetically than a work that doesn’t. So we can say that we can evaluate the aesthetic success of a work in part by evaluating how imaginatively engaging it is.

If a feature of a film makes it impossible to engage with it imaginatively, we can say that the film is aesthetically flawed. Consider a non-moral example to make the point. Suppose you are watching the film Braveheart, set in medieval Scotland, and you are blessed (or cursed) with a particularly keen eye for detail. In the middle of the funeral of Wallace’s wife, you spot, in the distance, a white station wagon cruising along the road deep in the background. For a moment, you stop focusing on Wallace’s grief; you’re startled by the station wagon, for there aren’t any station wagons in medieval Scotland. You’ll probably chuckle and resume engaging the film, perhaps making a mental note to joke about it with your friends later. But in the moment, you’re distracted, and you’re not participating imaginatively in the film. We can say that there shouldn’t have been a station wagon in the background, and the film is slightly marred aesthetically by the error in filming that left it in.

Now, some moral flaws jar us out of the fiction. For example, the film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) features two scenes of extraordinary sexual violence. The scenes are meant to be shocking, but some people find them so shocking that they simply refuse to engage with the fiction any further. They don’t want to imagine a violent rape. The phenomenon of refusing to engage in morally questionable imaginings has been dubbed imaginative resistance, and it’s a curious philosophical question as to why we balk at imagining immoral situations when we easily imagine time travel, warp drives, and aliens. For our purposes, however, we just need to recognize that imaginative resistance exists.⁷

Imaginative resistance can be triggered when a fiction asks us to endorse a point of view that we find repulsive. It is very hard to watch Triumph of the Will without cringing and harder to adopt the pro-Nazi mindset that Riefenstahl hoped to evoke in her audience. When imaginative resistance is triggered, we pop out of the fiction, refusing to engage it imaginatively.

The case of the station wagon in Braveheart shows that when a feature of a work causes us to fail to engage the work imaginatively, we view the work as thereby aesthetically flawed. Some moral flaws are like the station wagon—we cringe briefly and return to engaging the work. Other moral flaws are more serious and prevent us from successfully engaging with the work at all, like the pervasive moral horror at the heart of Triumph of the Will. Still other moral flaws go unnoticed; perhaps they are morally flawed attitudes that we endorse, or that sneak in. In any event, we can develop a new principle:

So what now should we say of the case of Breaking Bad? Most viewers do not seem to experience imaginative resistance. We could hold that the work is morally flawed because it invites us to adopt the perspective of an evil man but that the moral flaw causes no imaginative resistance. As a result, while it is morally flawed, it is not aesthetically flawed because we have no problem imagining White’s adventures or endorsing his attitudes. Recall what Gilligan said of Cranston’s acting ability, that he possessed the rare talent to play an evil person and make him sympathetic. The moral flaws of Breaking Bad are cloaked by Cranston’s talent, so that he makes us respond to the humanity of Walt, and we hardly notice that we are endorsing his crimes.

But perhaps there’s another way out, one much more flattering to us viewers. Walt is an anti-hero, possessing none of the virtues himself, but for most of the series he is self-deluded, believing himself to be a man who murders only out of self-defense, who cooks meth only out of desperation, who refuses offers of help out of pride, whose life spirals downward only out of a muddled desire to provide for his family. Cranston’s performance is such that we sympathize only with Walt’s noble self-delusions; and in the end, when he recants, repents, and pays for his crimes with his life and we are forced to confront his flaws, poetic justice has elevated his story. His moral flaws are sublimated. Breaking Bad never asks us to endorse his crimes, only to salute his struggle to define himself.

Notes

Works Cited

Suggested Further Reading